The inherent simplicity of the character, Bartleby, is only made so by Melville\u2019s preference to not divulge any of his background or insight into his character.\u00a0 But it\u2019s that same simplicity that allows for any number of contemplations on the meaning of Bartleby\u2019s story (“Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Tale of Wall Street”), thus making it actually rather complex.\u00a0 Bartleby is seemingly homeless, as he takes up residence in our narrator\u2019s office, and his disinterest in human interaction leads one to also assume he is mentally ill in some capacity.\u00a0 But really, we can\u2019t be the least bit certain of any of these inferences.\u00a0 From another perspective, Bartleby could be representative of all \u201cmisunderstood\u201d individuals, of which Melville was one.\u00a0 Because Melville was not well respected until after his death, it\u2019s likely he was writing a bit of himself into the character of Bartleby.<\/p>\n
The \u201cmildness\u201d of Bartleby\u2019s character is at first rather funny, and the narrator even found it \u201cnot only disarmed [him], but unmanned [him], as it were\u201d (Melville 5).\u00a0 And the other employees he asks for advice on how to deal with Bartleby are equally amusing, especially considering the known invalidity of their statements based on the time of day\u2019s influence on their particular personalities.\u00a0 As we learn more (while it\u2019s still only a little) about Bartleby\u2019s character, after the narrator discovers he is living in the office, the tale becomes a more tragic and sympathetic one.<\/p>\n
What miserable friendlessness and loneliness are here revealed! His poverty is great; but his solitude, how horrible!\u201d (6).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Eventually, the suffering soul of Bartleby led to his self-inflicted death\u2014his body ceased preferring to carry its own dead soul around.\u00a0 While the narrator finds it sad that he did not seemingly have enough money to live elsewhere, he believed the true tragedy of Bartleby to be the terrible lonesomeness that must come with such a residence.\u00a0 And it was that very solitude that the narrator cannot understand (and which made him greatly pity Bartleby), and which anyone who has not experienced a similar time being so alone could not relate.\u00a0 But it does seem Melville could relate to Bartleby, and because the story seems a commentary on humanity as a whole, many others understand that lonesomeness as well.\u00a0 And maybe another reason Melville gave us so little of Bartleby was so all of his \u201cmisunderstood\u201d readers could more easily identify (by writing their own life details in) and thus personally make sense of the very flat character.<\/p>\n